Deadly Sugar

Here's a lead that completely grabbed my attention:

"Begin on the sixth floor, third room from the end, swathed in fluorescence: a 60-year-old woman was having two toes sawed off. One floor up, corner room: a middle-aged man sprawled, recuperating from a kidney transplant. Next door: nerve damage. Eighth floor, first room to the left: stroke. Two doors down: more toes being removed. Next room: a flawed heart."

So starts N. R. Kleinfield's story, "Diabetes and its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis," the first installment of the four-part "Bad Blood" series this week in the New York Times. The stories by Kleinfield and Ian Urbina tell how more than one in every eight adults in New York has diabetes, causing health officials to label the disease an epidemic. The stories vividly show diabetes' human toll and spell out the long-term public policy and financial implications.
www.nytimes.com/pages/nyregion/nyregionspecial5/